


All Possible Futures

by Sheeana



Category: Young Avengers
Genre: Infidelity, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 18:16:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheeana/pseuds/Sheeana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After (another) spell gone wrong, Billy finds himself in the future - at least, one possible future out of many. While he's there, he meets someone familiar. Takes place during the new Young Avengers series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Possible Futures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NightsMistress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/gifts).



_"Allpossiblefuturesallpossiblefuturesallpossiblefutures..."_

Everyone else was asleep in their compartments, and Billy was sitting on the floor of the cockpit behind the pilots' seats. Alone in the near-dark, the light from the console was eerie and dim, faint red and green indicators that provided a backdrop to the blue glow at Billy's fingertips. His eyes were half-closed as he chanted softly under his breath. If he woke anyone up and they saw what he was doing – especially Teddy or Kate or Loki – he would never hear the end of it. America and Noh-varr probably wouldn't be too happy either, given what he'd done with their parents the last time he did something like this. Using his magic to peek at the future didn't seem like something any of them would be keen on.

He'd already seen so much. There were futures where he was the Sorcerer Supreme and he'd saved the world a dozen times. There were futures where he was an evil overlord with an entire universe under his thumb. There were futures where the Young Avengers became the actual Avengers and then something more, futures where they crashed and burned and splintered apart. Futures where he and Teddy got married and lived happily ever after, and futures where they didn't. Countless possibilities, and they were always in motion, always changing.

He could only catch glimpses while he sat here. Nothing concrete, not too much of any single future or he might get caught up in it and then who knew what would happen. He was playing with fire, except the fire was time and time travel was always a dangerous toy.

Still. He wanted to see. It was almost a compulsion, like he needed to see. Like he couldn't look away even if he tried. There were futures where humanity took to the stars and futures where they burned away on Earth as the Sun got brighter. Futures he shaped with his own hands and futures where he deliberately turned a blind eye to humanity's problems.

And yet he seemed to be stuck in the one reality where every decision he made twisted around on itself and became the opposite of whatever he wanted. He was either the worst or the best chaos magic user ever. He could never decide.

_"Allpossiblefuturesallpossiblefuturesallpossiblefutures..."_

Something caught his eye for a moment too long. A flash of something unexpected, a future he wanted to examine more closely. He focused. He fixated. His palms flared into light. He squeezed his eyes shut.

-

A bitterly cold, biting wind was blowing when Billy opened his eyes again. He was sitting cross-legged like he had been a few seconds before, only now he was sitting on a flat, icy surface, somewhere outside. On either side of him, mounds of ice rose off the ground. The wind was so fierce his eyes were tearing up, and so cold he started shivering almost instantly. That was easily fixed with a spell, though – or it would be if he hadn't been suddenly caught up in a gust of snowy wind that sent him sliding off the smooth, rounded edge of whatever he was sitting on. Only quick thinking and a metal bar jutting off the side of whatever it was – and whatever it was was apparently _flying_ above a mountain range - saved him from falling off the edge and possibly tumbling to his death, if he didn't get it together and fly before he hit the ground.

Finding himself in a situation like this shouldn't be unexpected anymore, but he was still startled. Startled enough that he was too busy pondering his circumstances to notice the hand slowly being extended to him from above, by a dark figure whose face was obscured by the snow and a hood.

It wasn't until it bumped into his arm that he looked up sharply and saw he wasn't alone. He took the hand offered to him, because he wasn't very interested in dying at this particular moment. Whoever it was, they couldn't be too much worse than falling off a flying block of ice. The figure hauled him up and its features resolved into a recognizable face through the curtain of blowing snow. Billy's eyes widened. The last person he'd expected to see was looking back at him.

"... Nate?!" he said, gasping audibly. "Iron Lad?"

The figure – Nate – dusted off his gloved hands and turned his attention back to a small, handheld device that Billy thought was some kind of computer. If he noticed who Billy was, he didn't say anything. His garish purple and green sleeves made a stark contrast against the snow and ice. Those were colors Billy recognized from countless hours spent researching the Avengers and their many, many associates and enemies, but they looked wrong on someone so familiar. He had Nate Richards' face and Kang the Conqueror's clothes. Billy hated that he couldn't easily tell which one he actually was. He was older than the last time Billy had seen him, but still looked young enough that it could go either way.

"Where are we? What are you doing?" he finally asked, when Nate still didn't say or do anything to explain what was going on.

"Saving them!" Nate replied, apparently distracted by whatever was blinking on the screen of his device. It was only then that Billy noticed that they were banking hard continually to the right, spiraling down, towards the ground, a lot faster than he was actually comfortable with. He also noticed that the rounded structures he'd seen before were actually transparent. Skylights covered in ice. It was a plane, or whatever passed for a plane in whichever future he'd ended up in. And it was crashing. And presumably full of people, if Nate was saving someone.

"Aren't you going to help?" Nate called out, and, well, what could Billy do? Once a Young Avenger, always a Young Avenger, or something like that. It was in his blood. Literally, considering who his original mother was. Or not so literally, since he wasn't actually related to her by blood. It was confusing even to him, and he prided himself on working these things out.

"Aren't you surprised to see me?" he called back, as he called up magic into his hands to slow their descent as much as he could. It worked better when he didn't want it to work at all, though, so there was only so much he could do with intent.

"Why should I be? I know what you're capable of."

"I don't even know what I'm capable of."

"Yes, you do." As if Nate knew exactly what Billy knew and feared about himself. He started to ask, but Nate was already back to examining the device on his arm, twisting a dial around on it and frowning. Something seemed to kick in, finally, because Nate's expression changed from intense concentration to a smile that was almost smug in its confidence. The ground was getting awfully close, Billy thought, peering down over the edge, but they were slowing down.

That was when a head appeared out of a hatch in the top of the aircraft, a balding, middle-aged man who wasn't dressed for the weather and didn't seem surprised to see them. Usually when someone didn't seem surprised to see them, it didn't mean anything good.

"Thought you could get away?" said Nate, crossing the space between them. He seized the man by his jacket collar and hauled him out of the hatch, dragging him across the icy surface until they were near the edge, still dangerously high above the ground. The man Nate was holding glared and said nothing. Billy suddenly realized that he wasn't getting the whole story on this. He'd dropped in halfway through with no way of seeing the beginning.

"I told you not to show your face again. I told you to leave this planet and its people alone," Nate said, but the man only responded by trying to kick him. Nate's eyes narrowed until his expression was cold and calculating, almost unrecognizable. Until he was wearing Kang's face. "... Fine. If that's what you want."

What happened next seemed to come in slow motion, everything over and done before Billy had a chance to react. Nate's fingers loosened. The man's feet caught on the icy surface. And then he was just gone, so fast they couldn't even hear him scream over the roar of the wind - or maybe he didn't scream at all. Maybe he fell silently to his death.

For a long time, there was only the sound of the wind.

"Nate-" Billy started to protest, but it was already over. "Nate, you didn't have to _do_ that."

"My hand slipped," Nate said coldly, and for the first time, Billy was genuinely afraid of him. They called him the Conqueror for a reason. He was brutal and ruthless and cruel. In all his searching, Billy had never found a future where Nate wasn't Kang. There was something about that he didn't understand yet - inevitability, something that was stable and fixed. Order. The opposite of chaos.

But whatever Nate was, he was also Billy's friend, no matter what, and that changed things. That made it more complicated.

"Young Avengers don't-"

"Don't what? Kill? Do you know what he was? What he did? How many people he killed?"

"Do you know what you are? What you're becoming? You're trying to help people, but you're doing it in all the wrong ways." But what ground did Billy have to stand on? It wasn't Nate who had thrown them all into a dangerous battle they couldn't hope to win just because he wanted to find out where he came from. It wasn't Nate who had called an interdimensional parasite into his own reality because he wanted to make his boyfriend happy. It wasn't Nate who had the power to destroy worlds literally at his fingertips. There were futures where the name Kang was all but forgotten, where Billy Kaplan was the name people whispered in the dark because they feared to speak it aloud.

He thought he saw the briefest flash of guilt across Nate's features, but it was gone before he could discern if that was what it really was. The next few moments were tense, passed in silence as Billy tried to decide what to do, whether to stay or leave Nate to his inevitable fate and return to the dark ship and his sleeping friends who tiptoed around him when they were awake. Even Loki seemed wary of what he might do or become. With good reason.

Before Billy could make any kind of decision, Nate came to one on his own. He started fiddling with the device on his wrist again. At first, nothing seemed to happen at all. Then Nate seemed to flicker and shimmer and Billy impulsively clutched his own head, mouth hanging open. Where there had been a single, linear memory in his mind, suddenly there were two sets. Two conflicting sets. He shook his head, desperately trying to clear it and make sense of what had happened.

"There," Nate said when it was over, sounding satisfied. "I handed him over to the authorities with evidence of his crimes. That's what Young Avengers do, right?"

"I don't know if that was such a good idea. I've, uh, had some bad experiences with changing the past... bringing bad things into the present..."

"It's about control, Billy. Maybe you can't control it yet, but I can. You could learn too." Billy wasn't convinced, but he couldn't change what had already happened. Well, he could, but the consequences for changing something more than once could be extremely dire. Even he wasn't stupid enough to risk it. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, watching it turn to steam in the cold air.

As they neared the ground, Nate took him by the arm and led him towards the edge of the aircraft. Billy peered down, suddenly completely distracted from anything that had been bothering him just seconds before. They were about to do something stupid. It always ended in doing something stupid. It was a law of the universe, or something. Two or more Young Avengers together always did something stupid in the end.

"Now!" Nate shouted, and pulled Billy over the edge.

 _"Nofallingnofallingnofalling..."_ he chanted, and, surprisingly, it worked. A blue glow surrounded them and slowed their fall until their feet touched the ground beside the spot where the fallen aircraft came to a fairly gentle landing on a grassy plain beneath the mountains they'd nearly crashed into. He was standing on the surface of another planet, but all Billy could do was breathe deeply and marvel at the fact that neither of them were dead and nothing truly disastrous had occurred.

-

They slipped away quietly before the authorities arrived, with only the slightest touch of Billy's magic to keep them hidden from prying eyes while they made their way to Nate's concealed spacecraft. Billy's inner geek's spirits hadn't been dampened enough yet that he wasn't at least a little bit gleeful at the idea of people owning personal spacecraft in the future. His gleefulness lasted all the way through the atmosphere and into orbit.

"You like it?" Nate asked, casually perching on the edge of a padded platform in front of a broad window that overlooked the vast expanse of darkness. The planet they'd left hung below them, illuminating the cabin in blues and greens and whites. Billy stared, transfixed. He'd seen things in his time as a Young Avenger. Amazing things and terrible things and things that defied any description at all. Views like these still never got old.

"Yeah," he said eventually, laughing at himself a bit. "Yeah, okay, I admit. It's cool."

He glanced down sharply when he felt warmth on his wrist to find Nate's fingers encircling his arm. When Nate tugged gently, he let himself be pulled down to sit beside him on the platform. He quickly realized it was actually Nate's bed, recessed into a space on the wall in front of the only window in the small cabin. Then he was sitting on a bed on a spaceship orbiting another planet, with Nate Richards' fingers asking a silent question at his wrist, and his lack of an answer was answer enough on its own.

Nate's wind-chafed lips met Billy's in a clumsy kiss, the kind he and Teddy had shared in the beginning when they were still learning how their elbows had to fit so they didn't bump into each other. He shouldn't have even considered doing this. He had Teddy. He loved Teddy. But Nate's fingertips were warm against his skin, drawing him into the moment, so distant from where he'd been sitting in the dark trying to envision a place or time where he was something other than a ticking time bomb. This seemed like the first taste of reality after living in a dream for as long as he could remember.

For a second he didn't know if he was going to kiss back or pull away - a moment of indecision, a choice that affected the fate of everything and nothing at the same time. A constantly shifting future.

He kissed back. Nothing changed.

-

The ship drifted silently through space. Billy lay on his side, watching the stars through the window. From here, it felt like everywhere was stretched out below them. The whole universe and all of time, and they could go anywhere, but right now they were nowhere in particular. Nate's hand was tracing shapes on his back between his shoulders, through the thin fabric of his shirt.

"Why don't you ever come visit?" Billy asked stupidly, not thinking. He never did enough of that. Never thought things through, never considered the consequences.

"You know why."

"Sorry." He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, testing his bare feet on the floor. The material it was made from looked like some kind of ceramic or stone, but it was warm to the touch and it almost seemed to conform to the shape of his foot when he stepped on it. All possible futures, he thought wryly. In some, technological development took a turn for the worse. In others, it took a turn for the weird.

Behind him, Nate was sitting up too, examining something on a shelf beside the bed. Billy took his silence to mean he didn't want to talk about it, which was a sentiment he understood perfectly well. He never wanted to talk about it either. It was his fault Cassie was dead. No one ever said it, but he knew they were all thinking it. If he had been more cautious, everything would be different.

"I should go," he said, to break the silence. "Teddy will wonder where I am." He wouldn't actually, of course, because of the nature of time travel, but he said it anyway.

"Don't worry," Nate said, with a wry smile, taking Billy by surprise. "You'll be seeing me around. No matter how far I go, something always brings me back to where I started. To you."

"We're your team, your _friends_ -"

"Not the Young Avengers. You. Billy Kaplan. Asgardian. Wiccan. The Sorcerer Supreme. The Annihilator. Every other name anyone has ever called you or will ever call you. I can never seem to get away from you." Something about the way Nate said his name made him feel both singular and ordinary at the same time. He was a pretty normal seventeen year old originally from the Upper East Side who had flung himself nine hundred years into the future by accident and happened to possess magical powers that had no real limits and only sporadically worked the way he wanted. He terrified himself, and he wasn't ready for what he might become. He needed to go home so he could stand on firmer ground again.

But part of him didn't want to go home. Part of him wanted to lose himself in the spark of light that was always ready at his fingertips. Part of him wanted to let it grow until it consumed him.

In at least one future, he never went back to Teddy and the others at all.

-

There was a heavy feeling in Billy's chest weighing him down when he slipped silently into the bedroom where he'd left Teddy, two days and nine hundred years ago. Tiptoeing only got you so far when your boyfriend was an alien with super-everything, so he used a bit of magic to keep quiet until he was sliding underneath the blankets as carefully as he could, doing his best not to disturb Teddy.

In spite of all the possible realities and futures he'd managed to discern, he'd never imagined himself _cheating_ on Teddy. It had always seemed unthinkable. So much for that. Apparently anything was possible. He thought about what Nate had told him, about being drawn to him, about meeting again, and he wondered about the thrill of anticipation he felt. What it meant about them both.

When he'd situated himself mostly under the covers, he rolled over and pulled the blankets protectively around himself. Behind him, Teddy stirred and started to sit up, obliviously rubbing sleep from his eyes, but he stopped when he saw Billy was getting back into bed. As soon as Billy was settled, Teddy was doing the same, lying down behind him and draping an arm across his waist. Like normal. Like Billy had just gone to get a glass of water.

"Where've you been?" Teddy asked, yawning.

A dozen answers flashed through Billy's mind in quick succession. Practicing his magic, going for a walk, getting some air, talking to Kate, checking the ship, eating a midnight snack. There were almost as many possible lies he could have told Teddy as there were possible futures they could live.

"Out," was all he said, in the end.


End file.
